Zack Hample has snagged 7,806 baseballs at 51 different major league stadiums since 1990. Find out how and see what else he's been up to.

December 2006

If you’ve been reading the comments on this blog, you’ve probably seen a few from a guy named Rich Snodgrass. Last week, Rich mailed me a baseball card. For free. Just to be nice. Here it is (front & back):

And so, thanks to Rich, the card commemorating Barry Bonds’ 724th career home run finally gets to meet the ball itself…

Back in August, I posted a crappy video of my catch. Here’s a better one. It’s an AVI file, so I’m not sure if it’ll work on PC’s…and just to warn you, the file is about 37 megabytes, so it might take a minute to load.

Happy New Year, especially if your last name is Zito. (Are these contracts insane or what? How many overpriced Barries do the Giants need?)

I made my acting debut yesterday as “Gus the cabbie” in an independent film that my friend Carl (from “Inside Pitch“) has been working on.

I had to be on location in an industrial neighborhood in Astoria, Queens at 7am, and to make matters worse, I had unexpectedly stayed at someone else’s place the night before…someone whom I’d met hours earlier at a holiday party…someone so attractive that my mind had trouble accepting the situation as reality…so I wasn’t too happy about setting the alarm for 5am and then having to crawl out of bed (with two hours of “sleep”) so I could cab home and grab the directions and eat and change into crappy clothes and cab out to Queens.

And then I was kept waiting for FOUR HOURS until my scene was ready to be shot.

At least I got paid. And at least I got free lunch. And at least I had extra time to memorize my lines. I had to say them while driving a cab (in actual traffic) while making eye contact with my passengers in the rear-view mirror while stopping the car at certain points. Not easy. But I think I pulled it off.

Yesterday, I added photos to all my yearly pages in the Baseball Collection/Lists section, starting with 1993. (Scroll to the bottom of each page and you’ll see them.) Since my last entry, I also added a section of “Bonus items” within the Baseball Collection/Photos page. Among the various items I’ve collected at games over the years, you’ll find some never-seen lineup cards like this…

Almost. Just in the last few hours, I overhauled my home page and Links, and before that, I added a couple dozen Photos. I even took an artsy-fartsy pic for the bottom of my Contact page. Last weekend, I wrote nearly 6,000 words for the FAQs, and since then, I went to my parents’ place, combed through my entire collection of baseballs, and photographed the best ones. If you click the Baseball collection link and select Photos, you’ll see the following:

From there, you can check out all six categories and learn more than you ever wanted to know about balls. (Let me know if you find typos or broken links, or if you see anything that doesn’t make sense.) I’m exhausted and excited, having worked on this thing non-stop for weeks. It feels great to finally have it up and running…

Okay, so it’s still not the absolute final version, but the cover is basically ready. Check it out:

The thing that’s going to change is Keith Hernandez’s attribution. Initially, it said “former Mets captain and Golden Gloves winner,” and now the line is omitting his on-field exploits altogether. It still needs a tweak, and I’m not sure what it’ll end up saying. Maybe something like “former Mets captain, MVP, and five-time All-Star,” although the issue there would be that he didn’t actually win the MVP in 1979. He tied for first with Willie Stargell. So my editor might leave that out and mention his 11 Gold–not Golden–Gloves instead.

It’s a total fluke that I ended up getting the quote. My friend Jules (from 9/14/06 at Camden Yards) has an ex-girlfriend whose new boyfriend is best friends with Keith. That’s the connection. They all helped get my book into his hands. Lucky me. (And lucky Keith. I’m sure he learned a few things that’ll make his broadcasts next season even more colorful.)

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